Energy efficient communication in ad hoc networks from user's and designer's perspective

Abstract

We consider a game that models the creation of a wireless ad hoc network, where nodes are owned by selfish agents. We study a novel cost sharing model in which agents may pay for the transmission power of the other nodes. Each agent has to satisfy some connectivity requirement in the final network and the goal is to minimize its payment with no regard to the overall system performance. We analyze two fundamental connectivity games, namely broadcast and convergecast. We study pure Nash equilibria and quantify the degradation in the network performance called the price of anarchy resulting from selfish behavior. We derive tight bounds on the price of anarchy for these games. We also study centralized network design. One of the most important problems in wireless ad hoc networks is the minimum-energy broadcast. Recently, there appeared many new applications such as real-time multimedia, battlefield communications and rescue operations that impose stringent end-to-end latency bounds on the broadcasting time. However, the existing algorithms that minimize the broadcasting energy tend to produce solutions with high latency. In this paper we consider the problem of bounded-hop broadcast. We present approximation and heuristic algorithms for this problem.